Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm (1951)
Article 5920 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-6-2021
Directed by Edward Sedgwick
Featuring Marjorie Main, Percy Kilbride, Richard Long
Country: USA
What it is: Rustic hijinks

Ma and Pa Kettle welcome their first grandchild into the world, but an encounter with the other set of grandparents for the child results in a rift between the child’s parents. Will everything work out to a happy ending?

The fantastic content is buried in a minor subplot to the movie. Pa Kettle becomes a radioactive dynamo who can cause electrical items to work just by holding them in his hand. Only about one-third of the movie deals with this situation; the rest of it is more concerned about the rustic Kettles and the urban Parkers. As a whole, it’s sporadically funny enough to get by, and it even borrows a bit I remember from Abbott and Costello involving trying to divide 25 by 5 and getting 14; I suspect this was an old vaudeville routine. For me, the funniest bit was how some of the characters avoid a kidnapping charge after stealing three babies from the hospital.

Mr. Incredible and Pals (2005)
Article 5699 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-4-2019
Directed by Roger Gould
Featuring the voices of Craig T. Nelson, Samuel L. Jackson, Roger Jackson
Country: USA
What it is: The closest I’ll come to reviewing Clutch Cargo

Mr. Incredible, Frozone, and Mr. Skipperdoo have to locate Lady Lightbug after she steals a bridge.

Given the high quality of Pixar’s animation work, the presence of this extra on the THE INCREDIBLES 2-DVD set is hilarious, as it features some of the characters from the movie in a cartoon modeled after the style of “Clutch Cargo”. Yes, it’s a one-joke premise, but it’s a funny joke. Furthermore, I highly recommend that the viewer also view the copy featuring commentary from Mr. Incredible and Frozone, who are seeing this for the first time; it deepens the joke and is much funnier than the version without commentary. This is one of my all-time favorite DVD extras.

Mary and Gretel (1916)
Article 5672 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-3-2019
Director unknown
No cast
Country: USA
What it is: Early stop-motion doll animation

Two dolls are brought to life and told not to pick flowers. They meet a white rabbit and characters from the story of Rip Van Winkle.

I will grant that the stop-motion animation here is certainly excellent for such an early film; it’s a pity that IMDB doesn’t have any credits for who is responsible for this. Certain individual scenes have a cute charm to them as well. The downside is that the short is also rather aimless; though the dolls are the putative main characters, most of the footage involves the bowling dwarfs and the white rabbit pilfering some of their grog, scenes that do not involve the wandering dolls at all. Granted, with only a seven minute running time, there really isn’t going to be much of a story to begin with, but you do expect the action to be more focused than what we have here. It’s an interesting oddity.

The Magic Cloak (1914)
aka The Magic Cloak of Oz
Article 5669 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-28-2019
Directed by J. Farrell MacDonald
Featuring Mildred Harris, Violet MacMillan, Fred Woodward
Country: USA
What it is: Another Oz story

A family leaves their home and have a series of adventures; the son unexpectedly becomes king of Noland, the daughter is given a magic cloak by a fairy, and a donkey is stolen by robbers.

This is another of the three Oz movies scripted by L. Frank Baum in 1914. Reportedly, it was as long as the others, but was cut into two shorts for release in England. The original film is lost, but the two shorts survived, and were edited back together to create a shortened version of the original feature. You would think with all of this editing the story would be rendered incomprehensible, but actually, I found it the most coherent of the three films; maybe they ended up editing out the worst of it. Unlike the other Oz stories, this features none of the characters from The Wizard of Oz, but I rather like it doesn’t try to tie it to that other book; after all, Oz is an entire world. Once again, the costumes are the best thing about it, and though the story is coherent, it really isn’t all that good. Still, after having seen the other two movies from this series, this is perhaps the best of the lot.

Max fait du ski (1910)
Article 5662 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-9-2019
Directed by Louis J. Gasnier and Lucien Nonguet
Featuring Max Linder and Gabrielle Lange
Country: France
What it is: Slapstick

Max goes skiing and proves not to be particularly competent at the task.

IMDB classifies this slapstick short as a fantasy. Perhaps it is; the print I saw feels like a fragment, so there is a chance that something fantastic happens in the missing footage. As to what it could be, I have no idea; the plot description on IMDB gives no hint on what it could be. So let’s classify this one as a false alarm and this review as more of a warning for those expecting something more. On its own terms, it’s not bad; Max Linder was a talented physical comedian, and his antics are on the fun side. Still, it’s pretty obvious and hardly essential.

The Mermaid (1910)
aka Rusalka
Article 5661 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-1-2019
Directed by Vasili Goncharov
Featuring Vasili Stepanov, Aleksandra Goncharova, Andrej Gromov
Country: Russia
What it is: Opera adaptation

A prince jilts a miller’s daughter, who attempts suicide. He is haunted by her image at his wedding. He decides to go back and discover her fate…

Like Feuillade’s THE FAIRY OF THE SURF, this is another early drama in which the story involves romance and ends in an underwater kingdom. Unlike that film, though, the romances in this one all go sour, and the mood is gloomier. In terms of plot this one is more obscure; I’m not sure if the miller’s daughter has truly committed suicide or has survived, or whether the vision during the wedding is a ghost or just the prince’s imagination. However, I may attribute the confusion here to the fact that it’s an adaptation of an opera which most assuredly ran longer than ten minutes; obviously, much plot detail has been obscured. Nevertheless, this one is not as satisfying as the Feuillade film. And for those wondering about the title, there do appear a group of mermaids, albeit ones without fish tails.

Le Miroir Magique (1908)
Article 5656 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-25-2019
Directed by Segundo de Chomon
Featuring Julienne Mathieu
Country: France
What it is: Decorative short

A woman sees visions of other women in her mirror and her jewelry.

There’s a certain type of silent short that I’ve decided to call “decorative” shorts. They’re usually very short, have no real plot, and seem to be focused on pretty visual tableaus above anything else. This is an example; it mostly consists of a woman sitting by her makeup bureau and seeing visions of dancing women in her mirror, and then her jewelry. It’s pretty enough to look at (which I suspect is its main goal), and it’s too short to really get dull, so it could be said that it succeeds. Still, it’s rather difficult to assess shorts like this beyond these points.

The Magnetic Telescope (1942)
Article 5601 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-17-2018
Directed by Dave Fleischer
Featuring the voices of Bud Collyer, Joan Alexander, Jackson Beck
Country: USA
What it is: Superman animated short

When police try to prevent an overzealous scientist from pulling in a comet with his magnetic telescope, the resulting complications cause a comet to come hurtling towards the earth. Can Superman prevent the collision?

I was about to give the whole series a rest for a bit, but this one varies the formula enough that it caught my interest. Rather than a villain or a monster as Superman’s foe, he’s up against a force of nature, and it’s one in which brute force alone cannot solve the problem. Instead, the problem will be solved by Superman’s endurance and quick thinking. It’s also nice that Lois Lane for once proves to be part of the solution rather than as merely someone to be rescued. It also varies a few other minor cliches of the series so it doesn’t come across as derivative. For my money, this is one of the better entries.

Le moine (1972)
aka The Monk
Article 5596 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-13-2018
Directed by Adonis Kyrou
Featuring Franco Nero, Nathalie Delon, Nicol Williamson
Country: France / Italy / West Germany
What it is: Faustian temptation

A charismatic monk succumbs to temptation and falls into sin, crime, sorcery and depravity.

This movie was based on a sensational eighteenth century novel. Apparently, Luis Bunuel had made two attempts to get this one made, but both fell through; this one was directed by a friend of his with a script at least partially inspired by the Bunuel treatment. I wonder what it would have been like if Bunuel had directed; it certainly would have ended up better than this rather tepid affair. The most interesting touches are in the story itself; the title character attempts to reap the benefit of the devil’s help without actually selling his soul, but the devil is tricky enough to entrap the monk in a spiral of misfortune until things get so desperate that the monk is forced to make the deal. From what I can tell, the movie takes some definite liberties with the novel; in particular, the ending is very different. I suspect the ending is very much Bunuel’s contribution to the script, as it fits in well with his anti-clerical attitude. It’s interesting, but it falls short of what it could have been.

The Monkey’s Teeth (1961)
aka Les dents du singe
Article 5591 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-3-2018
Directed by Rene Laloux
No cast
Country: France
What it is: Therapeutic oddity

A dentist steals his patient’s teeth to give to a rich person. Will the patient find justice?

This short popped up unexpectedly as an extra on my copy of FANTASTIC PLANET. It has a very interesting backstory; Rene Laloux took part in an experiment where he made an animated film in which the story and characters were developed by people in a mental health home. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the resulting short would be more than a little strange; parts of the story are vague and some of it doesn’t make much sense, but it nevertheless makes for a fascinating viewing. The very premise has a strong element of horror, and the story also involves a “monkey magician” as a character (I’m glad I was told that’s what it was, because I wasn’t really sure). This one is very interesting and unusual.